Amplify Reading is a supplemental digital literacy instruction program that provides students with practice and explicit instruction in the underlying phonics, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension skills that are essential for fluent reading with good comprehension (e.g., Cartwright, 2010; NICHD, 2000; Oakhill, Cain, & Elbro, 2015). The overarching goal of the program is to provide engaging individualized instruction and practice in the skills and strategies that have the most impact on literacy, while making it explicit to students that the skills they are practicing are things that good readers do while they are reading. As repetition with variety is an essential part of effective literacy instruction (e.g., Schuele & Boudreau, 2008), after a brief introduction to each activity, students are given repeated opportunities to practice these skills with varied stimuli. They receive immediate feedback for their responses and are given more explicit instruction in areas that are challenging. The instruction provided incorporates documented principles of effective instructional delivery; the activities engage students in multiple opportunities to practice critical skills at an appropriate pace with consistent feedback and prioritize student engagement and motivation, helping students to see their own growth toward reading goals (Carnine, Silbert, Kame’enui, & Tarver, 2016; Gersten, et. al., 2009; Deci, & Ryan, 2012.). Activities build on an existing computer-based intervention that has been documented to improve the decoding skills of students in multiple experimental studies(Richardson & Lyytinen, 2014). Since learning is promoted when students use their knowledge across tasks (e.g., Merrill, 2002), generalization is encouraged through ebooks with embedded activities that reinforce skills recently practiced in related games.
Instruction is closely aligned with the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards (CSSS) for literary and informational texts and the North Carolina English Language Arts standards. The program was designed to include content that is most effective at building the word reading and comprehension skills of elementary students (e.g., NICHD, 2000; NIFL, 2008), including at-risk and struggling readers (e.g., NICHD, 2000) and English language learners (e.g., August & Shanahan, 2006). The content focuses on foundational reading skills (i.e., phonological awareness and phonics) as well as vocabulary and reading comprehension.
In addition to the focus on critical foundational reading skills, our online student instruction incorporates the latest research on the underlying skills that build reading comprehension. Current research indicating the underlying skills that are critical for reading comprehension (e.g., Cartwright, 2010; Oakhill et al., 2015) heavily influenced the core content of instruction in the curriculum. A mental model is a network of idea units that readers construct in order to comprehend the gist of what they are reading (e.g., Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1988). Since students who struggle with reading comprehension are often weak in the underlying language and literacy abilities that are required to create a cohesive mental model (e.g., Cartwright, 2010; Oakhill et al., 2015), Amplify Reading focuses instruction on these so that students can build the skills required to have a deep understanding of the content they are reading. These underlying skills, collectively referred to as microcomprehension, are explicitly and systematically targeted in the program. Some of the key skills that make up microcomprehension include making inferences, using text structure to support comprehension, understanding complex sentence structure and connectives, and monitoring comprehension. Rather than focusing instruction on tasks that require students to use microcomprehension skills (e.g., read a passage and answer questions to show understanding), this program has been designed to build up students’ foundational comprehension skills so that they will be able to create the strong mental models that are required for deep understanding of text.
